THE GHETTO AND THE WORLD
that the Chassidic Rabbi, Noachke, elicits from the grass, the sky, and
the very tatters of his disciples at the climax of the story, "Between Two
Cliffs.") There is a political use in Peretz' refraction of this light of
the
shekhina.
It invokes the creative powers, the
((shaffende koiches"
of
the
phrase familiar to the rhetoric of Yiddish culture, in the name of
which we shall orient our life as Jews, as Reb Noachke did in his
worship, so that the Divine Light shine down on our things of this
world, which will answer with their own natural light. But here there
is also an immediate celebration of the love of life itself, prior to the
Divine; it is the joy in this world, the eros and agape at one in nature.
That this light of nature has been extinguished in liberalism is no
fault of the latter, though Peretz, like all the liberals of his time, who
believed in progress, did not foresee that the power of love would yield
before the love of power. Only power philosophers like Nietzsche were
clear on this point. Peretz, "good Jew" and "good European," all his
life identified the progressivism of the nineteenth century, which had its
actual origins in doctrines of natural and social struggle, and was essen–
tially a power philosophy in disguise, with the loving, communal spirit
of the Chassidim. This was of course a serious mistake, but the blame
lies more on generosity than myopia. For Peretz did make provision for
self-defense, of a kind, against the enemy. (No Polish Jew could forget
pogroms.) The defense of this liberalism with its many exposures was to
lie in community. Under this new dispensation the Jews from all over
Europe were to form a community within the community of nations
in
close and harmonious contact with one another; this influence was to
radiate from Poland, which in turn had it from Peretz in the image of
the balanced complexity of his own nature.
It
was as an example of
life, to themselves and to the rest of the world, that they were to survive
and grow; a life at the highest pitch of creative tension, all cohering–
workers, socialists, scientists, actual Chassidim-with the power of the
new Yiddish word that Peretz spoke. It was sheer generosity, such re–
liance on culture, and would have been recklessness, could one even
have imagined the maniacal fury that was to break loose. But Hegel was
reclaimed by the Germans. A community was exterminated, which other–
wise would have survived as one of the highest secular cultures of all
Europe.
Isaac Rosenfeld
211
